Woodrow “Woodie” Assaf

He was never a meteorologist, but he identified, proudly, as a “weatherman.” At the time of his death in 2009, he was the second-longest-serving weather reporter in the United States, having worked at Jackson-based NBC affiliate WLBT since the station was launched in 1953.

“Woodie” Assaf, however, was something far more than a local weatherman. He was a Mississippi institution whose career tracked the evolution of broadcasting. On his daily weather reports on WLBT’s various newscasts, the Lebanese American “Woodie” Assaf was a warm and avuncular presence, with heavy, dark-framed glasses and a head of wavy hair that audience members, over the years, watched fade to gray. He had a gravelly, folksy accent, and his reports often had an incantatory quality, as he gave a report on the weather across Mississippi’s eighty-two counties. Generations of Mississippi children also gathered to watch his annual Santa Tracker radar on Christmas Eve—a feature that was preserved in its original form and shown each year, even after radar technologies grew more sophisticated.

But Assaf hadn’t always been a weatherman, and his expertise ranged far beyond weather. He was born 15 March 1917, in McComb, Mississippi, the youngest of six. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Talya, Lebanon, and had arrived speaking only Arabic. Assaf attended McComb High School before attending Southwest Mississippi Junior College. He briefly attempted an entertainment career in Los Angeles and then attended the Columbia School of Broadcasting in Chicago (where he was reportedly told he “would never make it”) before entering the service in World War II.

After the war he launched his broadcasting career in earnest at WKSB radio in McComb before moving to the major Jackson radio station WJDX. He joined WLBT from its founding in 1953 (originally WJBT), initially reporting on sports and weather before settling in as the station’s weather frontman. Assaf throve at the station—even after turbulent times, when, in 1971, the station lost its license due to violations of the Fairness Doctrine. The result was a forced sale of the station, which resulted in far more multicultural, multiracial programming under the station’s first Black general manager, William Dilday.

In locally produced commercials and programming, Assaf was a spokesperson for, among others, Sunflower Food Stores and Seale-Lily ice cream, and his charitable endeavors were an integral part of his public profile. After Hurricane Camille devastated much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, Assaf spearheaded a fundraising telethon and succeeded in getting entertainer Bob Hope to call in. He assisted fellow Lebanese American Danny Thomas in helping raise support for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and was a longtime spokesman for Easter Seals in Mississippi. He also led a longtime Santa’s Toy Chest initiative at the station.

Assaf continued to build his brand during the later years of his career, launching his Weather School quiz as part of his weathercasts, a segment in which he rang a school bell to rouse the audience to attention. He—and WLBT—also capitalized on “What’s Woodie Say?,” a song by local singer-songwriter David Womack that referenced Assaf’s weather predictions. Upon his ninetieth birthday in 2007, his daughters’ solicitation for celebratory notes was met with a deluge of some two thousand letters.

When Assaf died in 2009, the same throng of fans requested that his funeral be livestreamed. At the funeral, David Womack himself played a piano version of “What’s Woodie Say?” as the recessional.

“Grandpa used to say he had a lot of offers to leave Mississippi,” said his grandson Woodrow Hartzog, a telecommunications professor at Northeastern University in Boston, “but he chose to stay, because he always said how much the people of Mississippi meant to him.”